Angel Island Poetry

Abstract

Angel Island poetry refers to Chinese poems carved on the barrack walls of the US Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay, which was in operation from 1910 to 1940. An estimated 50,000 Chinese were processed and detained during that period there and left their words, recording a dark chapter of racial exclusion in history. These poems were written in the classical style of Chinese poetry and were discovered by California State Parks ranger Alexander Weiss in 1970, who contacted his teacher George Araki from San Francisco State College. Araki brought the site to the attention of the community and invited San Francisco photographer Mak Takahashi to photograph these poems. Today, around two hundred poems from the Angel Island barracks have been deciphered and published in various places, though many still remain indecipherable. The Angel Island poetry sources include the Jann and Yee collections, Mak Takahashi’s photographs, Kearny Street Workshop (KSW) rubbings, poems published in various Chinese newspapers, and the findings of poetry consultants commissioned in 2003 by the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation for an evaluation. In this article, the Angel Island poetry more specifically refers to two editions of Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940, edited by Him Mark Lai (who passed away in 2009, between publication of the two editions), Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, since most scholarship has derived from these two books. The first edition of Island was self-published in 1980, which set up a model of editing and presenting Chinese-language material, consisting of a historical introduction, 135 poems in Chinese and English, excerpts from thirty-nine oral-history interviews, and twenty-two photographs. Island went into a second printing in 1983 and was republished by the University of Washington Press in 1991. The second edition of Island, published in 2014, combines all 135 poems into one section and expands the Chinese poems by adding those on the walls from the immigration stations at Ellis Island in New York and Victoria, British Columbia. Yung and Lim rewrote the historical introduction and replaced the excerpts of oral histories in the first edition with twenty full profiles and stories, with new translations, correction of errors in the first edition, and more photographs. Island possesses a unique place in Asian American studies, ethnic studies, US immigration history, and American literature classes.